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Black Folklore: How West African Stories Traveled and Survived
In one Akan telling recorded in the 1930s, the storyteller opens by taking it all back: We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.
Children of Blood and Bone: The Orisha Behind the Film Adaptation
In the behind-the-scenes footage there is a moment where a costume designer lifts a beaded panel and talks about weight — how it hangs, how it will move at a gallop.
African Mythology in Fiction: Why the New Wave Isn't New
In 1938, a schoolteacher in western Nigeria published a novel in Yoruba about a hunter who walks into a forest thick with spirits and does not come home the same man.
Adinkra Symbols in Urban Murals: The Sentence Behind the Sign
The advice comes with so much goodwill that it feels rude to test it. Put the symbol in the work. You paint, or you letter, or you shoot, and somewhere behind you there is Ghana — a parent, a…
African Mythology and Oral Tradition: Reading the Form
There is a question that comes near the end of almost every reading. A hand goes up somewhere in the middle rows, and someone asks the novelist where the magic came from — as though African mythology…
Tomi Adeyemi, Orïsha, and What the Film News Leaves Out
Children of Blood and Bone is not a story from Yoruba religion. It was never trying to be, and its author has been clearer about that than most of her coverage has.
Jungian Archetypes Applied to African Traditions: Àbíkú, Ọgbanje, and the Child
The first time I saw the name written down I read it as a line of verse. Málọmọ́ — má lọ mọ́, do not go again.
Children of Blood and Bone: The Film Trailer and the Real Orïsha
The word lands early, cut over drums and a horizon of red dust: Orïsha. Three syllables, one diaeresis, the name of a kingdom that has never existed anywhere but on a page.
Netflix Releases and African Mythology: What One Number Misses
A multiplex in Lekki on a Friday night seats a few hundred people. Nigeria — a country of more than 200 million — has fewer than 200 cinema screens in total.
Magical Realism and Jungian Archetypes in African Storytelling
In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world.